A Practical Walk

Since I shared that I’m viewing my job right now as making our dollars stretch, I thought it’d be fun to share some of the ways I’m doing that on a weekly basis. Personally I’ve really enjoyed reading this type of post at The Frugal Girl, The Prudent Homemaker and The Non-Consumer Advocate, so why not do it here on my own blog?

Cooked and baked! The bread recipe I use the most is just a simple white bread recipe from my Betty Crocker Cookbook, but sometimes I make the batter bread recipe. The batter bread takes less time as there’s no kneading necessary and it only rises once.

I also made banana bread using the universal muffin recipe. I love this recipe and use it frequently! This time I made a double recipe using soft bananas, applesauce in place of oil, and did water for half the milk. I added chocolate chips to some of the muffins and blueberries to the rest of the muffins and the 2 loaves of bread. One loaf went into the freezer for future use.

I made yogurt, but it didn’t set. The Frugal Girl gives tips for why this might happen and how to use yogurt that didn’t thicken, so I don’t plan to waste it. UPDATE: It DID set! Just took longer than normal.

Gardening. I’m continuing to garden, trying to do a minimum of 30 minutes a day. I planted some green onion bottoms from some store-bought ones. I also planted some blanket flowers and marigolds, both some of my favorite flowers!

I’m continuing to compost, I love that those scraps can be used to help my plants, plus our trash rarely gets stinking because we’re not throwing those things in there. When we filled our raised bed this week, we mixed some of our compost in.

Speaking of the raised bed. It’s made out of scrap material from our house. My husband is replacing the siding on the gable ends of our house. So he re-used some of the old siding for the bed! I love that it’s not getting wasted, and I got a free garden bed out of it! I finally put some plants in the raised bed, and then guess what happened? Click here to find out.

When I needed to put plant markers in the garden, I did a little brainstorming. It had to be water-proof and something I could write on. I wasn’t going for fancy or cute, just functional. As I thought through what I had on hand, I landed on a used Chinese-take-out container. After we got Chinese food a couple of months ago, I used the plastic containers for food storage, but decided it could be cut up as garden markers now.

I kept asking Nacho if he wanted to help me with the garden work, he responded by giving me this look and continuing to sit on his favorite shelf in the shed.

Walked. I walked to and from Bible study and the kids walked to and from youth group. The weather has been good walking weather. We get a little free exercise and don’t spend any on gas doing it. This is one of the things I love about where we live, we have church and a store easy to walk to.

Thrifted. My daughter took some donations to Goodwill and got the 20% off one item coupon. Now that it’s warming up, she wanted some shorts and a different pair of dress sandals. Here’s the items my family got at Goodwill that day:

• Shorts $3.59 after student discount
• Dress sandals $4.79 after using 20% off coupon
• Shirt $3.59 after 10% off student discount
• Shirt $1.79 after 10% off student discount
• Belt $7
• Book 89 cents after 10 % off student discount (although she paid for that out of her own personal money).

Cute Old Navy wedge sandals my daughter got for only $4.79!

I really wanted to get a certain book. I ended up getting it from ebay where it was $1.61 cheaper than Amazon, and that’s not including paying Amazon shipping.

What money-saving activities have you been up to?